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Introduction: Matter and Perception – Interactions Between Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Natural Philosophy _full_journalsubtitle: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period _full_publisher_id: ESM _full_abbrevjournaltitle: Early Sci. Med. _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 1383-7427 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1573-3823 (online version) _full_issue: 6 _full_issuetitle: 0 _full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien J2 voor dit article en vul alleen 0 in hierna): 0 _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (rechter kopregel - mag alles zijn): Introduction _full_is_advance_article: 0 _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0 Introduction Early Science and Medicine 25 (2020) 537-542 537 www.brill.com/esm Introduction: Matter and Perception – Interactions between Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Natural Philosophy Doina-Cristina Rusu Faculty of Philosophy, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands [email protected] While the concept of ‘matter’ has received much attention from scholars of early modern philosophy, this is not the case with ‘perception,’ and is even less so when it comes to a consideration of the relationship between the two. One reason might be the fact that by ‘perception’ we usually understand sense-per- ception, and we think of the empirical theory according to which we acquire knowledge about the world through our senses, when these capture the sensi- ble qualities of external objects. But what about Leibniz’s claim that monads, simple immaterial beings, have perception, and that sensation is a more com- plex type of perception?1 According to Leibniz, the sufficient reason of change and (mechanical) motion in the material world is to be found in the percep- tion of monads: Moreover, we must confess that the perception, and what depends on it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons, that is, through shape and motions. […] Furthermore, this is all one can find in the simple substance – that is, perceptions and their changes. It is also in this alone that all the internal actions of simple substances can consist.2 For Leibniz, the mechanical interactions of material bodies will ultimately be accounted for in terms of the non-mechanical actions of simple substances, namely, the perception of monads. Perception and appetition – the monads’ tendency to go from one perception to another – are their two characteristics and the principles of change. As principles of change, they are the causes of all 1 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Principles of Philosophy, or, The Monadology, in Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, ed. and trans., Philosophical Essays (Indianapolis, IN, 1989), 215. The same idea is explained in The Principle of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason, ibid., 208. 2 Leibniz, Monadology, 15; italics in the original. © Doina-CristinaEarly Science and Rusu, Medicine Groningen, 25 (2020) 2020 | doi:10.1163/15733823-00256P01 537-542 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 01:17:05PM This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY 4.0 license. via free access 538 Rusu motion in the created world. This is to say that, at the basic level, the building blocks of the world, the monads, are purely perceptive beings, and perception cannot be accounted for in terms of something else, as it is foundational. The context in which Leibniz talks about the perception of monads is a metaphysical one, while the aforementioned empirical discussion of acquiring knowledge about external objects though sense-perception pertains to an epistemological context. Of course, the two contexts are closely connected. According to Leibniz, sensation is a special kind of perception, specific only to animals and humans because, for these beings, perception can be accompa- nied by memory. Through perception, simple substances represent other sim- ple substances; through sense-perception, composed substances represent other composed substances.3 Leibniz’s metaphysical account of perception needs to be seen against a rich Renaissance background. One of the first authors to make perception foundational for bodies and natural phenomena was Bernardino Telesio, in his De rerum natura (first edition in two books, 1570; second edition in nine books, 1596). In Giglioni’s paraphrase, Telesio defines perception or sentience as “the ability present in active principles (heat and cold) to recognise similarities and differences while they proceed to shape matter through movements of pursuit and avoidance.”4 As for Leibniz, Telesio’s account of perception is transforma- tive, but contrary to Leibniz, Telesio’s perception is corporeal, as it presupposes physical interaction. By positing sensation or perception at the basic level of material interactions, Telesio avoids the need for an immaterial entity, such as substantial forms of the scholastics, in order to explain activity in general and life in particular. To be perceptive means to be active, and thus, given that eve- rything is perceptive of its surroundings, everything is alive, animated, vital. Of course, there is a difference between a stone, a plant, and an animal; but this difference is one of degree and not of kind. 3 For Leibniz there must be continuity between the level of monads and that of composite beings. In a letter to Lady Masham, he clearly expresses the connection between perception at the two levels: “[M]y entire Hypothesis comes down to recognizing in imperceptible and unobservable substances something proportional to what can be observed in those things within our reach. Hence, assuming for the moment that there is in us a simple Being endowed with Action and Perception, I find that Nature would be scarcely unified if the particle of matter making up human bodies were the only one endowed with features that make it infi- nitely different to the rest (even physically) and completely heterogeneous with respect to all other known bodies.” (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Damaris Masham, May 1704, in Jacqueline Broad, ed., Women Philosophers of Seventeenth-Century England: Selected Correspondence(New York, 2020), 197). 4 Guido Giglioni, “The First of the Moderns or the Last of the Ancients? Bernardino Telesio on Nature and Sentience,” Bruniana & Campanelliana, 16 (2010), 69-87, 72. Early Science and MedicineDownloaded from 25 Brill.com09/24/2021(2020) 537-542 01:17:05PM via free access Introduction 539 Several natural philosophers in the second half of the sixteenth and the sev- enteenth centuries followed Telesio’s naturalist approach and used matter’s perceptivity to explain a wide range of phenomena. One of the most promi- nent is no doubt Tommaso Campanella, Telesio’s advocate. In his On the Sense of Things and on Magic (Del senso delle cose e della magia, 1604), Campanella makes perception the principle of identity: through perceiving the surround- ing bodies, each body becomes aware of its own existence, at the same time as it recognises similitudes and differences in the other bodies. Every action is thus a reaction to the act of perception: bodies accept or reject other bodies depending on whether the latter help or hinder their self-preservation.5 Fran- cis Bacon, Jan Baptista van Helmont, Francis Glisson, Anne Conway, and Mar- garet Cavendish, to name a few authors before Leibniz, make use of the concept of perception in a metaphysical context, and they all promote a vitalist matter theory, in some cases as a clear counterpart to the mechanical philosophy, which presents matter as dead and inert. Two of the papers in this thematic issue deal with this metaphysical aspect. While Dana Jalobeanu shows how Bacon creates instruments able to measure the subtle perception of bodies, the ontological interpretation which Laura Georgescu offers of Cavendish’s approach to perception seems to imply that the intimate knowledge of the other bodies’ perceptive actions is not a matter of measurement, but of interacting with these actions and experiencing them. Moreover, Georgescu’s paper argues that for Cavendish, metaphysical per- ception cannot be understood in analogy with sense-perception, since they are completely different. In this metaphysical context, matter perceives and is being perceived, which is to say that in perception, there is no active and passive body, as there is activ- ity everywhere. This rejection of the active-passive distinction becomes more problematic in the epistemological context: Are the senses active or passive? Is the perceived object active or passive? These questions received different an- swers depending on the tradition to which the authors discussed in this the- matic issue belonged. The answer depended on the status of the perceived entity, this is to say, on the underlying matter theory.6 5 See Guido Giglioni, “Senso, linguaggio e divinatione nella filosofia di Tommaso Campanella,” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia, 64 (2009), 309-320. 6 For an overview of different answers to the issue of active sense perception, see Jose Felipe Silva and Mikko Yrjonsuuri, eds., Active Perception in the History of Philosophy. From Plato to Modern Philosophy (Cham, 2014). On sense perception, see Simo Knuuttila and Pekka Kärkkäinen, eds., Theories of Perception in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (Dordrecht, 2008). Early Science and Medicine 25 (2020) 537-542 Downloaded from Brill.com09/24/2021 01:17:05PM via free access 540 Rusu For Aristotelian-scholastic authors, bodies have primary qualities (heat, cold, moisture, and dryness), secondary qualities (depending on the combina- tions of the primary qualities) and tertiary or occult qualities (which depend on their form). Primary and secondary qualities depend on matter, but the act of perception does not always involve material entities. Many authors used explanations in term of immaterial species emitted by the objects and received by the senses.7 In the mechanical philosophy, which became prevalent in the seventeenth century, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities changed drastically. Secondary qualities now referred to the sensory qualities and were dependent on the perceiver. At the same time, they remain reducible to the primary qualities, the size, shape, motion, solidity, and texture of the particles of matter. The act of sense-perception itself will be nothing more than matter in motion.
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